Meme

A meme is a mental belief or behavior learned
from others. Another definition is a "unit of cultural information." Memetic means
of or dealing with memes, just as genetic means of or dealing with
genes. Memetics is the study and
practical application of the abstraction of memes. The concept
of memes moved from academia to mainstream thinking in 1976 with
the publication of Richard
Dawkins' perennial bestseller, The Selfish Gene.

How memes can be used to solve social problems

In 1976, in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins dropped a bombshell. In a few quick paragraphs he sketched out what memes are, why they existed, and why they were so crucial to the study of all species whose niche dominance requires a stong culture. The potential of social engineering has not been the same since, because now we can apply all the principles of evolution to learned, memetic behavior, rather than just innate, genetically based behavior. In other words, cultural engineering is now as realistic as any other branch of engineering.

The importance of memes lies not in an exact definition, but in the
strong parallel between memes and genes, both of which are evolving
replicators. This allows the large body of generic knowledge
associated with genetic life forms and ecological systems to be
applied to the behavior of memetic life forms and social systems.
For example, the Competitive
Exclusion Principle of ecology applies equally well to genetic
and memetic life forms.

All memes are learned from others, either directly from other
people or indirectly through a transmission medium, such as books
or television. All words, unless you made one up yourself, are
memes. All learned values, such as “trustworthiness is good,” are
memes. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, because we learned them
from others, are gigantic sets of interrelated memes. All learned
behavior and facts, such as how to run a factory or how to run
a country, are memes. Anything we have learned is memetic, rather
than genetic.

When a meme is learned it has replicated from one mind
to another. When a meme fails to replicate, it has lost out in
the struggle for survival of the fittest. Whenever a meme
replicates, it undergoes a little or a lot of variation,
such as the way each new generation pronounces a word differently
or interprets what an idea means. Thus memes evolve just as genes
do, because they follow the same three steps of the evolutionary
algorithm: replication, survival of the fittest, and variation.

Memes can form strongly interlocked collections of memes. Basic
types of memes are facts, rules, and relationships. Using these
building blocks, memetic life forms can be built just
as easily as genetic life forms. Biologists have found the abstraction
of a genetic life form very productive. Behaviorists are starting
to find the abstraction of a memetic life form just as productive,
because it exposes the behavioral components of social behavior
so clearly. The same pattern is beginning in the field of robotics.
There are three types of life forms: genetic, memetic, and robotic.
Examples of memetic life forms are cultures, religions, corporations,
types of governments, political ideologies, fields of science,
and fads.

Thus history is not merely a cryptic series of fascinating events
caused by people doing this and that. It is much more. The history
of civilization is, at the macro level, the history of the evolution
of its memes, particularly those that have reached the large life
form level. If you understand a society's memes and how and why
they evolve the way they do, then you understand what really makes
that society tick. And if you understand that, then you can figure
out how to engineer that society to evolve the way you want it
to, within reasonable bounds.

Therefore it is entirely possible, using the science of memetics,
to engineer the human system so that it runs sustainably, much
like a well engineered machine can run flawlessly, and with proper
maintenance and replacement of parts as they wear out, indefinitely.

The book that started it all

If you like, you can read the
last chapter in the book that started it all, Richard Dawkins' The
Selfish Gene, first published in 1976. Here is a famous
quote from that chapter:

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged
on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still
in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval
soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate
that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for
the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of
cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme'
comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that
sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive
me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation,
it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory',
or to the French word même. It should be pronounced
to rhyme with 'cream'.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes
fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as
genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body
to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in
the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which,
in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears,
or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues
and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.
If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading
from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed
up an earlier draft of this chapter: '... memes should be regarded
as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize
my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation
in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism
of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme
for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically,
millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems
of individual men the world over.'

Our analysis of the sustainability problems uses a simulation model called The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace. The model uses nodes like memetic infectivity, incubation time, false memes, undetected false memes, repulsion memes, and true memes to model the problem. Without the abstration of a meme, we would have been unable to model the problem as we did. The results would have been a weaker model, and probably the diagnosis (the root causes) would have been flawed.

Are you as concerned as we are about the rise of populust authoritarians like Donald Trump? Have you noticed that democracy is unable to solve important problems like climate change, war, and poverty? If so this film series is for you!

Why is democracy in crisis? One intermediate cause is a weakened Voter Feedback Loop. Powerful root cause forces are working to weaken the loop.

The most eye-opening article on the site since it was written in December 2005. More people have contacted us about this easy to read paper and the related Dueling Loops videos than anything else on the site.

Do you every wonder why the sustainability problem is so impossibly hard to solve? It's because of the phenomenon of change resistance. The system itself, and not just individual social agents, is strongly resisting change. Why this is so, its root causes, and several potential solutions are presented.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.